Ruby Dee Has Died at Age 91

Ruby Dee was born into a world that had hardly any place for African-American actresses. By the time she died on Wednesday, at age 91, she was perhaps the American acting world's reigning grande dame. She and her husband, fellow actor/playwright/director Ossie Davis, became a royal couple in show business, thanks to their undeniable versatility and talent, their civil-rights activism, and the dignified example they set for others to follow.

Born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, Dee moved with her family to Harlem at the height of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. Under the tutelage of a stepmother who had studied under W.E.B. DuBois, and living in a boarding house frequented by black musicians and other professionals, Dee grew up in a household marked by black pride and intellectual achievement. As a girl, she studied violin and piano and submitted poems to literary magazines. At New York's Hunter High School and Hunter College, she discovered drama and joined the then-new American Negro Theater, alongside such rising stars as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. She made her Broadway debut in a 1943 drama called South Pacific (not the later musical of the same title). Graduating from college with a degree in Romance languages, she worked as a translator by day and an actress by night.

At 19, Ruby had married actor Frankie Dee Brown, but the marriage lasted just four years, and by the time she was 24, she had taken up with Davis, whom she met when she appeared in his Broadway play Jeb in 1946. They were wed in 1948, and their 57-year marriage would produce three children, who survive Dee.

While she and Davis were carving out a place on the stage for African-American stories, movies and TV were slower to respond. Dee got her big break in movies in 1950's The Jackie Robinson Story, playing the baseball pioneer's supportive wife Rachel opposite Robinson himself. For the most part, however, she'd be offered little but maid roles for the next decade or so, yet she managed to distinguish herself in such dramas as Edge of the City (opposite Poitier) and St. Louis Blues. Back on Broadway, she and Poitier starred as the striving couple in the 1959 landmark drama A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play written by a black woman (Lorraine Hansberry). Dee and Poitier would reprise their roles in the 1961 film version.

Throughout the 1960s, Dee would appear in stage and screen productions with a political bent, however subtle. She starred in Davis’s stage satire Purlie Victorious and the film version, Gone Are the Days. She became a cast regular on Peyton Place as the wife of a wealthy black doctor. Other starring film roles included crime drama The Incident and Uptight, a drama Dee also co-wrote and co-produced, about the aftermath of Dr. King's murder.

For Dee and Davis, activism for social justice was inseparable from show business. Both were about presenting positive images, stirring consciences, and being heard. They were the emcees for Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington. They were the rare couple who befriended both King and Malcolm X; Davis would give eulogies for both men at their funerals.

By the time she was in her 50s, Dee was already something of an elder stateswoman to new generations of African-American performers. She continued to shine in the theater (notably, in her one-woman shows: Zora Is My Name, as novelist Zora Neale Hurston, and My One Good Nerve, based on Dee's own memoir). She appeared in countless made-for-TV movies and miniseries, most memorably I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Roots: The Next Generation (she claimed credit for introducing Alex Haley's then-unpublished manuscript to producer David Wolper), Decoration Day (her only Emmy win, among eight career nominations), and The Stand (as the leader of the forces of good in Stephen King's post-apocalyptic parable). On film, she and Davis gave wrenching dramatic performances together in a pair of Spike Lee movies, Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. Remarkably, she did not earn her first Oscar nomination until age 85, for best supporting actress in 1999's American Gangster, as druglord Denzel Washington's conflicted mother. (Really, what other actress could slap Denzel Washington?)

Dee showed no sign of slowing down, even after Davis died of a heart attack in 2005. She continued to narrate documentaries, play the occasional grandmotherly role in TV movies and features, and give lectures. At 90, she narrated the Lifetime movie Betty and Coretta, about the widows of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. To the end, hers was the voice, not just of trailblazing women in African-American history, but of the strong mothers and grandmothers who have been the consciences of us all.